This practice-led research examines the intergenerational transmission of trauma and cultural memory through the mother–daughter relationship within the specific historical context of South Korea. While psychoanalytic discourse traditionally frames subject formation as a process of separation from the maternal body, this study questions the necessity of complete severance, particularly in contexts shaped by collective trauma. Drawing on feminist revisions of psychoanalysis: Kristeva's semiotic chora, Irigaray's maternal difference, Butler's critique of essentialism, and Ettinger's concept of the matrixial borderspace, the research reconceptualises subjectivity as relational and co-emergent rather than strictly individuated.

 

Situating this theoretical framework within South Korea's modern history of colonisation, war, authoritarian regimes, and rapid industrialisation, the study investigates how maternal labour, silence, and sacrifice have shaped psychic and cultural memory across generations. Engaging trauma and memory studies, particularly theories of belatedness, witnessing, and postmemory, the project explores how inherited affective residues persist within embodied experience.

 

Through corporeal performance and moving-image practice, this research develops an artistic methodology that seeks to reactivate the matrixial trace of intergenerational memory. By creating sensory encounters through sound and image, the work proposes art as a space where relational subjectivity can be experienced beyond symbolic language. Ultimately, the study contributes to feminist historiography, psychoanalytic theory, and trauma studies by localising relational models of subjectivity within a South Korean context and by demonstrating how artistic practice can function as both critical inquiry and embodied re-encounter.